The demand for systems that use a variety of devices at a location to monitor a variety of conditions, such as monitoring homes and businesses for alarm conditions, allowing users to centrally control various devices (such as thermostats, switches, cameras, appliances, etc.), monitoring medical conditions, and the like has continued to grow as more home and business owners seek better control over their premises and to protect it from various hazards and threats. Such hazards and threats include intrusion, fire, carbon monoxide and flooding, among others dangers that may be monitored and reported to a monitoring station.
Conventional systems typically employ a control panel and/or gateway that receive “event” (such as triggering alarms) and other information from various sensors and devices, and are used to operate those devices. This may be done locally by the user, or remotely through a monitoring center via a plain old telephone service (POTS) line, digital subscriber line (DSL), IP broadband connections, or cellular radio. In the case of certain alarm events, the monitoring center may also take appropriate action, such as notifying emergency responders. Installation and servicing complexity associated with these systems tends to be high as an installer has to physically mount the control panel onto the wall and manually configure the various sensors. In particular, the installer has to spend lots of time manually programing and configuring the control panel and each sensor in the system, thereby slowing down the installation process and limiting the number of security systems the installer can install in a given time period.
This is true as well for more recent all-in-one (AIO) security systems, in which the control panel and a user interface (such as a keypad) are combined in a single unit. Installation of the AIO security system requires an installer to manually program and configure the single unit and each sensor in the system. While the installer saves time by not having to install, i.e., mount, the control panel, the installer is still required to individually program and configure the control panel and multiple sensors in the security system, which is s time consuming process.